InterestingShit

Sort By

Dates

Duration

It seems like the world's second biggest continent is starting to create conditions for the world's sixth ocean!
The two tectonic plates beneath the continent of Africa are slowly but surely moving away from each other. The tectonic movement has created a crack in the desert that could house a new ocean in the future. The fissure, located in Ethiopia, has reached lengths of 60 kilometers in recent years and sealed itself with 2.5 cubic kilometers of molten rock, as volcanoes are coming alive and erupt on the surface.
The only eruption of the Dabbahu volcano in recorded history occurred on September 26, 2005. The eruption began 5 kilometers northeast of the summit, while ash from the eruption darkened the area surrounding the volcano for nearly 3 days. It was this eruption that formed the 37 mile long fissure.
The tectonic plates are moving apart at a rate of 2 centimeters each year, so when the fissure completes itself, it will span from from the Red Sea in the north, taking water from the Gulf of Aden, all the way down to the Horn of Africa, separating it from the rest of the continent.
How long will you have to wait until you can dip your toes in this new ocean? We guess that you could make an arrangement in about a million years or so.

The largest mass shooting in the U.S. took place in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was encouraged in part by the police.
Greenwood, a segregated area of Tulsa was thriving thanks to a local oil boom and the district earned itself the nickname “Black Wall Street”. The white population was resentful of the success of the African-Americans.
Tensions boiled over when a black man was suspected of assaulting a white woman. An angry mob gathered at the courthouse where the man was detained. Gunshots were fired between blacks and whites.
The next day, a white mob descended on Greenwood and burned it to the ground. Police deputized 500 whites as Special Deputies. Up to 300 black people were murdered, mostly by gunfire. Some of them by the deputized whites who were also torching the neighborhood. More than 1,200 homes were looted and burned, 9,000 people were left homeless. Lest we forget!
The phrase "Lest we forget" is commonly used in war remembrance services and commemorative occasions in English speaking countries, in particular Remembrance Day and ANZAC Day. Before the term was used in reference to soldiers and war, it was first used in a 1897 Christian poem written by Rudyard Kipling called "Recessional".

It seemed innocent enough at the time-build an underground polar research station to study ice core samples. What people didn't know about was the covert plan to set up a nuclear launch pad capable of firing off hundreds of missiles at Russia.
The U.S. Army has left a ticking time bomb in Greenland—but it doesn’t take the form that you might think…this powder keg is environmental in nature.
In 1959, the Army Corps of Engineers commenced “Project Iceworm”, an effort to build secret nuclear missile launch sites under the ice of Greenland. A base called Camp Century was established, and an underground city of sorts was created. The official cover for the base was as a research station, investigating ice construction techniques.
When they discovered that the constantly moving ice is unstable for future construction, Camp Century was abandoned, leaving a small city complete with a theater, a chapel and it’s very own nuclear reactor.
The reactor was removed in 1967, but a great deal of toxic waste is still left behind, and what with global warming taking its toll on the ice caps, that waste leaking into the world’s ocean is just a matter of a century or two.
“Out of sight” doesn’t always mean “Out of mind” too.

Vegas is a tale of two cities. There’s fun Vegas: the one that last year welcomed over 42 million visitors to its oasis-in-the-desert location, enticing them with its promise of booze fueled never-ending good times and the possibility of winning big bucks on a slot machine or blackjack table.
Then there’s not-so-fun Vegas, the Vegas where the city’s laser-like focus on tourism has trumped the need to provide adequate care on its social services front. Many of the flood tunnel dwellers are examples of the city’s inability to properly address the fallout of an economy that’s based primarily on activities that stoke the fires of addiction.
Welcome to the 300 or so miles of flood tunnels inhabited by approximately 1,000 homeless people fighting to survive under America’s original city of sin.
That flooding is a constant threat for the occupants, some of whom have built semi-permanent elevated living spaces on top of discarded boxes and crates that keep what possessions they have out of the standing mix of water and sewage but aren’t structurally sound enough to withstand floodwaters.
A Las Vegas-based author Matthew O’Brien founded Shine a Light, an organization which works in tandem with HELP of Southern Nevada to supply basic day-to-day necessities as well as addiction counselling and medical services to those living in the tunnels. He’s also started a Crowdrise fundraiser, the proceeds from which are immediately put to use giving support to those who now have to call the tunnels ‘home’. (source:www.interestingshit.com)

It’s a puzzle that might have enticed Indiana Jones. Let’s say there was a metropolis from ancient times hidden in North America. Where would it be?
This city was bigger than Paris or London at the time it existed, and it housed approximately 30,000 people. That’s about the size of Juneau Alaska today (if you include the surrounding boroughs). If this estimate is correct, it was the largest city in the United States until the 1780s, when the population of Philadelphia finally surpassed it. So where was this lost historic capital?
The city was called Cahokia. It hit its peak population in the year 1050, and then it was abandoned by the year 1400. We don’t even know the name of the people who lived there. The city is named after the Cahokia tribe which lived in the area, but for the record, the Cahokia tribe claimed no connection with the city; it was the European explorers who named it.
The whole area was designated as a state historical site about 40 years ago, and made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. It is always comforting to see history receive the recognition it so richly deserves, but this ancient metropolis also has a lesson for all of us in modern times: the greatest cities of mankind are often very dependent on specific environmental circumstances, and if those circumstances change they can have a very dramatic impact on the people who live in and around them. (source: www.interestingshit.com)

When a 17-year old girl celebrated Christmas by falling 10,000 feet from a plane she proved Santa might not need to be packing a parachute.
As far as holiday airport mayhem goes, chances are the 92 occupants (86 passengers and 6 crew) of the propeller powered LANSA Flight 508 flying between the Peruvian cities of Lima and Pucallpa had probably all seen worse.
For some of them, the seven hour wait in the busy airport a day before Christmas might have been the most frustrating thing. Two of said passengers were Juliane Koepcke and her mother Maria, traveling home to meet her father.
At the 40 minute mark of what was supposed to be an hour long flight, Flight 508 hit a thunderstorm in a pitch black sky. As the plane continued further into the storm, its body began to shake violently.
Juliane was in the midst of a 10.000 foot free fall, when she fell unconscious. When she did come around, she was on the ground in dense rain forest, with with a severe concussion and a broken collarbone, a scrape on one arm and a deep gash on her leg, the rest of the plane scattered across almost 6 square miles
Despite being heavily injured and unsuitably dressed for the jungle, the 17-year-old set out to find her mother. With a bag of sweets she found in the wreckage as her only source of food, she struggled to get out of the wreckage. Eventually she stumbled across a group of lumbermen, maggots falling from her open wounds. The men took her to a nearby village, where a pilot flew her to a hospital in a town called Pucallpa, where she was finally reunited with her father.

This is the story of 'Lucky' Yamaguchi who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs in 1945.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a 29 year year-old naval engineer in the employ of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, where he designed oil tankers. After a three month stint in Hiroshima, he was preparing to return to his hometown to his wife, Hisako and young boy, Katsutoshi on August 6th, 1945.
When he arrived at the railway station, he realized he had left his travel papers behind at the shipyard and returned to collect them. That is when he heard the drone of a large aircraft overhead - the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay.
Yamaguchi saw the bomb Little Boy drop, connected to a small parachute, less than two miles away from where he was standing. He dived into a ditch before the boom split his eardrums, and the shock wave lifted him like a rag doll and threw him further away. “Lucky” was badly burned across the face and arms, and feared blindness, but this was the blotting out of the sun by the debris.
After sleeping the night with two other surviving co-worker, Yamaguchi set on foot to reach the train station, where the train was miraculously waiting to take him home, to Nagasaki.
Three days later, despite the doctor's orders to stay put and rest, Yamaguchi's work ethic was still robust enough for him to go back to work, when the second bomb hit. He thought the mushroom cloud was following him, but the blast spared his family.
Tsutomu 'Lucky ' Yamaguchi was the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as a “nijyuu hibakusha,” or “twice-bombed person.” He was given the the distinction in 2009, only a year before he died at the age of 93.

Today, if your home phone is still plugged into the wall, you are being archaic. We live in a world of instant everything – food, calls, texts...Imagine what it must have been like to have to send a pigeon to deliver your message and wait for the reply?
Pigeons have been used as messengers since 3000 B.C. The raven might have the thunder in Game of Thrones, but it is the pigeons who are the go to bird to deliver your message even today.
How do they do it, you ask? They just fly home! Thanks to their abilities for magnetoreception, they instinctually align and orient themselves to the magnet fields of the Earth. The simplest example comes from the first Olympic games in 776 BC, when every athlete was to bring his own pigeon; if they won, he would release the pigeon, so that the bird might deliver the news of the victory to his village.
Even the famed Genghis Khan was a huge fan of homing pigeons and used the birds to establish communications with Eastern Europe and Asia. These birds were a massive tactical advantage for his men.
For the past few years, the police has caught carrier pigeons attempting to various contraband into prisons, like drugs, sim cards, even cell phones!
Let us see you send a cell phone via email!

Feed a cat-like critter a coffee cherry, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. The results may be delicious, but at what cost?
Any discussion on kopi luwak, some of the most expensive coffee in the world, must start by getting one thing out of the way…Yes! We are talking about coffee beans—that come out of the butt—of this animal; the Asian palm civet. Let’s take a BIG step back and explain how it all works.
The beans we know and love are harvested from berries, or cherries. This is also where the civet comes into play. While you might think of coffee as a delicious cup of joe, perhaps covered in chocolate, the civet actually eats the cherry whole and poops out the seed, or bean. If you are worried about bacteria from the poop, don't worry – they all get nicely cleaned up during the roasting process. Studies suggest that this type of processing eliminates the bitter notes from the bean, resulting in a distinctly different flavor.
The dark side of the dark roast is the problem with supply. The civets are wild animals and locating their feeding and pooping grounds can be a challenge. Some manufacturers have tried keeping them in cages, while force feeding them the berries and denying them other types of foods they usually eat, leading to allegations about animal cruelty.

Dogs in Moscow have been making as much use of the public transport as their human counterparts. Since the collapse of the Soviets Union in 1990, the squads that used to handle the stray dog problems have retired, which brought the onslaught of stray dogs. However, these four legged citizens of the streets of Moscow have discovered that there is a safe and warm way to cross from one end of the city to the other, and that is to use the subway network. Not only do they get to travel faster than on foot, they occasionally receive a free meal and the benefit of human companionship.
Here you might ask yourself, how a dog knows on which station to take off. One expert says that doggy senses play the key role to their navigation skills. These dogs rely on the behavior of human passengers to know when to get off the train and the positive reinforcements, such as food and comfort.
There are roughly 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow, and about 20 of them have become regular commuters of the metro. These dogs have probable learned the activities that human commuters repeat daily, like peak rush hour, store openings and closings, and the nightly shutdown, and are encouraged by them.

The United States of America was basically built upon tax revolt, so why do we have to pay it? The Boston Tea Party showed their protest against the British tax system by dumping a consignment of taxed tea, which in turn led to a series of events that preceded the American Revolution. After The Resolution for Independancy in 1776, the United States raised money mainly by using import and export taxes.
President Abraham Lincoln was the first to introduce tax on personal income in 1861. This was so that he could fund the Civil War, so he imposed a flat tax for people who had incomes of $800 and over. By 1913, the 16th amendment was ratified, giving Congress the power to collect income taxes. They imposed a 1% flat tax on income over $3000, with additional 6% tax on income over $500,000.
By the time World War I started in 1918, everyone making over $1 million was taxed up to 77% to help finance the war. The American people took only a short breather, before they were taxed again to help alleviate the effects of The Great Depression. Taxes went up again in 1938, this time to help fund the Second World War and they stayed high until the 60s.
Compared to the past century, America now has the lowest tax rate.

In 1816 folks had a good excuse to complain about the weather, thanks to a huge volcanic eruption from Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year, making it the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Worldwide famine, floods & disease - all thanks to enough toxic ash in the sky to turn summer into winter.
Exactly 200 years ago, we had a year that is actually known as “the year without a summer”. In 1815, Mount Tambora (located in Indonesia) blew its top. But just how large was this event? Volcano eruptions are measured on a scale called the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), measuring explosivity, volume of ash and the height ash reaches into the atmosphere. For comparison,the eruptions of Mount St. Helens and Vesuvius were only ranked as 5’s on the index. The eruption of
Mount Tambora was a 7, making it the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. While the immediate area surrounding the volcano was burned and crops further away were covered in ash, the eruption caused a disruption in monsoon season in south-east Asia. In other parts of the world, the cloud caused a sudden and prolonged drop in temperatures, which led to perfect condition for the outbreak of cholera.
Not everything was as black and white, though. While the volcano was “throwing shade”, we started paving the road towards modern medicine, we got fantastic literature and Baron Karl Drais invented what is now known as the predecessor of the bicycle. See, something good can come out of bad things.

There are many things in this world that influence the way the world will develop. New inventions become the stepping stones for future innovations to follow. This happens to be the case for Elon Musk's Hyperloop idea! Does Elon Musk’s Hyperloop have its origins in New York City’s 1870 subway? Here is the bizarre story of the Big Apple’s first subway, built in secrecy by Alfred Beach. Who knew something like the New York City Subway could spark an idea that might change the future!
Isn't technology just awesome? Each day, it keeps constantly changing and evolving. Things such as the cell phones, which we take for granted, were only ideas of science fiction 60 years ago! Even the concept of the Hyperloop seems like science fiction to us today, but in the not so far future it may not! Technology is amazing!
It really is incredible that we have so much access to new tech at our finger tips. All we have to do is go online, looks up some of the best tech from Amazon and boom, you have a new piece of technology!
What are some of your favorite pieces of tech? Let us know in the comments!

Taking personal transportation from the ground and up in the skies seems closer than ever today. It seems that science fiction is slowly creeping into reality, as cars are getting more and more capable of flight. The world might be one flying DeLorean poorer, but present time car manufacturers are close to creating the first automobile that will shorten the distance you have to pass towards your destination.
Cartoons and movies might have had characters behind the steering wheel of a flying car for the past few decades. Hollywood surely won't even bat an eyelash if a car flew over their sky. But people have been trying to get their cars flying in the skies for the past century.
In fact, the first car to be successfully airborne was the Aerobile in 1934. Also called Aerocar, it was the first roadable aircraft that saw the light of day but never hit the pavement. The Aerocar was invented by Waldo Waterman, an inventor and aviation pioneer from San Diego, California.
Dozens of flying car prototypes have been made and tested since then, but the one who may have gotten closest to actually releasing one into the public has to be – drum roll please – Elon Musk! The Tesla CEO claims that his flying Model F will be ready to ship in 2019. Uber is also joining in on the “Back To The Future” plan, saying that they plan to have their cars in the air by 2020.

If you want to visit this museum, you better bring your scuba equipment with. Museo Atlántico is Europe’s First Underwater Contemporary Art Museum and it is located in Spanish waters.
Jason deCaires Taylor, an artist from Britain, was the mastermind behind this art with a message! In 2006, he created the world’s first ever underwater sculpture park in Grenada, Spain.
Last year, he made a 60 ton sculpture called Ocean Atlas, which he then sunk in Mexico.
His latest brainchild is Museo Atlántico, which is the first ever underwater contemporary art museum in Europe! It took two years for the museum to be constructed, which is located off the coast of Lanzarote in Spain. The museum consists of a series of 12 installations, each submerged under 46 feet of seawater. The 300 sculptures are based of local residents of the Lanzarote region.
The concrete used to make these sculptures is a specially formulated, PH neutral mix that promotes marina life and coral growth.
When you go to visit this unique establishment, you will be able to see stingray, octopi and barracuda, as they swim among the statues. The statues provide a unique opportunity to observe coral without harming the Ocean’s natural reefs.
The one installation that has been getting a lot of attention is titled “Crossing the Rubicon”, featuring 35 statues walking towards a small entryway in a 13 foot tall wall, “...a boundary between two realities, and a portal to the Atlantic Ocean”.

Let's throw a hypothetical scenario out there and say one day the sun just disappears. What happens to Earth? And more importantly, what the hell happens to us?
Imagine waking up one morning at the crack of 10 a.m., pulling back the curtains on your bedroom windows, only to find yourself staring into cold, bleak darkness. Now, if you are a permanent resident in a country affected by polar night, this should not come as a surprise. But if you are somewhere towards the Equator and you expect to see the sun at full power over the sky, then your instincts would be telling you that something is definitely up!
What if the above scenario you unknowingly found yourself in was caused by the sun ceasing to exist? You might never need to purchase sunscreen ever again, but Earth needs the Sun to survive. The last ray of sunshine will hit us about 9 minutes after the Sun goes bye-bye and all the planets will head out in space on a straight line. After 24 hours, all plant life will start to die, so you better pick up those crops you took so much care for. Trees might keep up for a while longer.
Basically, life on Earth would have come full circle. That is, if we don’t hit something on our way there.
Watch the video for some other interesting facts about life without the Sun. If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to share it with your friends!

When you think of Los Angeles, the first thing that comes to mind has to be the movie stars and the glamour. Like one of the gems that keep reappearing in those Hollywood movies, Los Angeles has a darker side – it's terrible traffic.
Traffic in LA has been terrible even a century ago, which prompted railway magnate E.H. Harriman to hatch a plan to bring the underground railways system to Los Angeles in 1907. It wasn't until LA's dependency on cars balooned 15 years later that the construction plants were finally in place.
It was supposed to be crown jewel to the city's already existing Pacific Electric Railway, considered to be one of the country's leading public transit systems. It was only the second electric-powered subway, after New York City. It took commuters mere 15 to 20 minutes to cross the city for mere 6 cents.
Then, 30 years later, “evil” enterprises come in, destroy all public mass-transit and start building freeways up and down Los Angeles, so that citizens may drive their cars, again. National City Lines, financed by General Motors, The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and Philips Petroleum bought PER and dismantled everything associated with it, ALLEGEDLY so that LA's commuters would again be forced to rely on the gas-powered GM buses and car in general.
The Belmont Tunnel was closed off and the Subway Terminal Building, which could service up to 50.000 commuters in it's prime days, was turned into condos.

It seems that Captain America wasn't the only one who got buried under tons of ice during World War 2 and got successfully recommissioned 50 years later.
During WW2, America made a squadron of airplanes to be flown across the Atlantic in the fight against the Nazis. In 1945, 6 of the airplanes had to make an emergency landing on Greenland due to the bad weather. The pilots were all rescued, but the airplanes had to be left behind and unrecovered for decades.
Fast forward 50 years into the future, a group of aviation enthusiasts went back to the Greenland in an attempt to recover the aircrafts. Time has made the airplanes drift a mile and were now buried under 27 stories of ice.
The team invented a machine they called Super Gopher, which pumped superheated water to drill a hole through the ice and reach the airplanes. The one plane they found most intact got dismantled and brought up back to the surface. They called her Glacier Girl. Each piece of the craft traveled 20 minuted up to the surface along the narrow shaft. The last and heaviest piece, weighing 3 tonnes, saw the first light of day of 50 years on August 1st, 1992.
in 2002, Glacier Girl was completely reconstructed and able to lift off the ground once more.

Just because you work for biscuits doesn't mean your job is any less important. The rescue dogs on-site at the Twin Towers both during and immediately following 9/11 made sure their noses - and their personalities - were always there whenever a human needed either.
Working dogs are trained to ignore loud noises when their owners are in need. When the Twin Towers were hit, two guide dogs by the names of Roselle and Salty ignored the sounds of the towers collapsing around them, as they led their blind owners to safety. Because it was their job.
The two Golden Retrievers took their owners down 70 flight of stairs engulfed in fire and smoke, letting the firefighters who climbed up to pet them. The two canine heroes shared the Dickin Medal from the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals in 2002.
Over 100 search and rescue dogs worked tirelessly on Ground 0 during and after the devastating event. When they weren’t working, the dogs offered comfort to those who were in pain or have suffered a loss. These dogs breathed smoke and dust while searching for survivors, while their paws would get bruised or cut, so veterinarians were on the site to provide comfort for the furry heroes as well.
The last surviving 9/11 rescue dog, Bretagne, died in 2016 and received a hero’s funeral in her hometown of Cyprus, Texas

During World War One, Russian soldiers in the Middle East came across a bear cub that will eventually become the mascot of the company.
They named him Wojtek, which translated means “Joyful Warrior”. By all accounts, the sub enjoyed play-boxing and wrestling with his fur-less comrades and would even understand when they've had enough.
As he grew, Wojtek the bear moved on from condensed milk and was given the same rations as the other soldiers, beer and cigarettes included. He has learned to smoke y watching the soldiers, though some report that he would actually eat the cigarettes, as he couldn't inhale the smoke. Eventually his rations would double, as he grew to be over six feet tall and weighing 485 pounds.
He travelled with his troop from Iran to Palestine and Egypt without a problem. When the time came to board a ship towards Naples, authorities wouldn't allow the bear on, so they made his an official soldier, which would later learn to salute, carry ammo or boxes of shells.
When the war finally ended, so did Wojtek's military career. He was discharged and transferred to the Edinburgh Zoo, where he lived for 15 years until his death in 1963. They commemorated him and his service with a statue in Park Jordana in Krakow, Poland and another one in Princes Street Garden in Edinburgh.

After the regular Nazis and the grammar Nazis, it is time we finally embrace the weather Nazis. Come again?
In the Northern Hemisphere, weather systems move from west to east, which meant that the Allied forces, controlling North America, Greenland, and Iceland, had an advantage when it came to understanding weather patterns and what was coming their way in Europe. This knowledge was a pivotal advantage and impacted military decisions. The conflict between the Allied forces and the Germans over accurate weather data was so intense, it has been called the North Atlantic Weather War.
In what has been called “the most important weather forecast ever”, meteorologist predictions led to D-Day being postponed to June 6, 1944 from the original date of June 5 (waiting for weather calm enough to attack across the English Channel).
Germany experimented with weather planes and submarines, which did give them some information, but isolated planes and submarines were often caught (and destroyed) by Allied patrols that were seeking to preserve their advantage in weather data.
German scientists at the Siemens Company found a way around this problem by inventing the Wetter-Funkgerät Land (WFL). While this sounds like an amazing name for a Euro-Dubstep band, it’s also the name for an automated weather station.
Find out more about this Nazi secret on North American soil in the video above!

When it comes to extinctions, it is as serious an issue as any. The end of a species as a very grave concern. There's talk about the return of the wool mammoth for some time now, but here we will tell you about something else that came out of extinction – the noble tree lobster.
It isn't an actual lobster, you see, so don't expect to see it on the menu at your local lobster place. Also known as the Lord Howe Island stick insect (a mouthful, we know), they were nocturnal stick insects that made excellent fishing bait. They couldn't fly though, as they were the largest insects on the planet, but they could sure run fast!
The noble tree lobster met his demise in 1918, when a supply ship called SS Makambo ran aground off the coast of Lord Howe island. By the time the ship was refloated, the black rats from the ship escaped and populated the island, which caused an ecological disaster. Apparently, the rodents found the stick insects a true delight and munched them into extinction.
By the 1960s, these insects were thought extinct, as not a single individual has been seen since the 1920s. What scientists didn't know is that 20 kilometers off the coast of Lord Howe lies Ball's pyramid, a 1844 feet high and 3600 feet long volcanic stack in the middle of the ocean. In 2001 explorers found feces under a bush – the only one of the rock formation – and went to search for the long lost bug.
Out of the 20-30 individual population that was discovered to the delight of the explorers,two couples were removed for breeding purposes. Today there are hundreds of live adult and thousands of eggs ready to go back home, to Lord Howe Island.

In the 1600s Japan was not a big fan of Western culture. To emphasize that point it banned its citizens from traveling abroad with a penalty of death if they did for over 200 years.
Sakoku (literally "country in chains" or "lock up of country") was the foreign policy of Japan under which no foreigner or Japanese could enter or leave the country on penalty of death.
The policy was enforced when missionaries from Spain and Portugal came with ambitions to spread the Christian faith in Asia. Christianity was forbidden in Japan and rewards were offered to anyone who will give out the location of Christians to the authorities.
No one was allowed to enter or leave the country. If people were caught leaving it, they would be mercilessly executed. Japanese people who were abroad and wanted to return were also prohibited. Japanese ships were prohibited from leaving Japanese waters and foreign ships were not allowed to approach. The only fleet allowed to dock were the Dutch East India Company, who they trusted.
Almost 220 years after the enforcement of Sakoku, American warships were sent to intimidate the Japanese into trading and in 1853, Japan opened it's borders once again.

This is the story of the hippie doctor that helped cure smallpox. Dr. Lawrence ‘Larry’ Brilliant was a former doctor for the Grateful Dead, who showed that spirituality and compassion can be key to medical breakthroughs.
He attended one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s lectures in 1962 and it changed a teenage Brilliant’s life forever. King’s lecture inspired Brilliant to do everything he could to assist those in need of help all around the world. It was a moment that led to the future doctor’s focus on global activism and awareness.
Larry Brilliant marched in civil rights rallies. He protested alongside the Native Americans on Alcatraz island.
While on a pilgrimage across the Himalayas in 1972, one Hindu guru told Brilliant his destiny: to find the cure for one of worst pandemics the human race has ever encountered - smallpox. This inspired the young 27-year-old doctor to leave for New Delhi and join the World Health Organization. A few years later, Brilliant would lead a WHO team that will be key in the eradication of the disease.
Today, his own SEVA foundation has helped 4 million blind people see again. “Seva” means “service to others” in Sanskrit.
He has been the executive director of Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org. He also chaired the Skoll Global Threats fund, continuing his fight against global pandemics.
In essence, Dr. Larry Brilliant is proof that caring for people can make the world a better place.

Animals can be amazing creatures. Sure, there are some wild animals that you would not want to get anywhere near, but there are also some that you could not wait to meet or see. Some animals even prove to be very helpful to humans as they can lend a hand with everyday tasks. Whether it is a seeing eye dog or a cat to help with emotional pain, animals truly are amazing.
This is seems to be the case when one man lost for days in the darkness of the Amazon jungle despite hundreds of people searching for him. How could anyone survive in that jungle? With the help of kind monkeys, of course. It seems that the most unlikely animal to assist a human proved to be very helpful indeed.
It seems that Maykool Coroseo Acuna was one of the luckiest men in the world. Not only did he survive 9 days in the amazon alone, but he had a group of monkeys take care of him until he was found. Who would have thought that a group of wild monkeys would look after a helpless human? What we do know is that this is one video you are not going to want to miss!
Please share this incredible story with your friends and family!